Reading, listening to, and questioning America... from the southern Great Plains

"Forget about occupying Wall Street — why not just defund it?"

... While most of us have been distracted by elections and fiscal
brinksmanship, the financial services industry has been waging a
furious, well-funded counter-attack that has been alarmingly successful
in wearing down the financial regulators. There has been hand-to-hand
combat about every word in every regulation. And win or lose, every one
of those regulations will be the subject of a scorched-earth legal
strategy that will go all the way to the Supreme Court. Working through
the Republican caucuses on Capitol Hill, the industry also has moved to
trim regulators’ budgets, block nominations to regulatory posts and deny
industry critics such as Elizabeth Warren seats on relevant oversight
committees.

The depth and breadth of the industry campaign to gut
Dodd-Frank is unlike any I have seen in Washington. I have no doubt it
was a factor in Mary Schapiro’s decision last week to retire as chairman
of the Securities and Exchange Commission. ...Steven Pearlstein, WaPo

There is a way to counter Wall Street's continuing power grab, as Pearlstein points out but I'd be willing to bet 100 shares of a blue chip that we won't get
off our butts and do it.

If we don’t like how Wall Street is investing it and lending it and what
they are charging to do so, then all we have to do is put it elsewhere. ...Pearlstein, WaPo

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
suggested a solution years ago.

What Brandeis had in mind was a new set of institutions that are owned
and controlled by their customers. Mutual banks and insurance companies.
Cooperatives of various kinds. Credit unions. Employee-run pension
funds. ...Pearlstein, WaPo

Wall Street's capitalism hasn't worked for most people. What Pearlstein offers is a more progressive (big and small "p") solution.

Here’s the point: If we don’t like the rip-out-your-eyeball culture of
Wall Street, if we’re tired of the inherent conflicts of interest, if we
don’t want to encourage the excessive leverage and risk taking and
executive compensation, we can take our money elsewhere — to companies
that deliver as good or better products and services at the same or
lower prices. Forget about occupying Wall Street — why not just defund
it? ...Pearlstein,WaPo